frogfish

Mike is right, Matt, but I'd also urge you to consider whether you really need to do the molas.  The situation at Crystal Bay in particular is now completely out of hand, but I'm not sure publicizing the names of other sites online is the best way to go either.  The few molas that still show up at Crystal Bay get mobbed by so many divers that it's hard to imagine they will keep coming back much longer.  

It would be great if it were possible to limit the number of boats and divers through a licensing or lottery system, but that's probably just a fantasy.  If you've never seen molas before, then I can well understand the draw - they are magnificent animals.  But we're approaching the point where one has to think about the likely effects of one's participation in this phenomenon.

Frogfish

Simon,  

The bleaching of anemones seems to have been going on for some time.  I took this photo a year ago (July 2009) at P. Banta, just outside the park boundaries, but there were lots of bleached Entacmaea quadricolor anemones in the same condition inside the park as well.  This seemed to be the only anemone species affected.  Bleaching of Acropora corals in the same area that I noticed at that time (July) appeared to be mainly the result of Crown-of-Thorns damage.

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Stew,

Corals in the Red Sea and other locations appear to be more tolerant of high ocean temperatures because of differences in their zooxanthellae (photosynthesizing symbiotic algae). Steve Palumbi (Stanford University and Hopkins Marine Station) is studying Pacific reefs that exhibited high thermal resilience, and have found healthy corals on reefs in lagoon areas where ocean temperatures are as hot now as the oceans are likely to get in 100 years.  

Scientists find heat tolerant coral reefs that may resist climate change

The key is not the corals themselves but the heat tolerance of the (Symbiodinium sp algal symbionts.  Scientists have now identified at least two different clades, one with the ability to tolerate much higher sea water temperatures.  In some locations, the symbionts of corals exhibiting higher resistance to thermal stress turn out to be "clade D" symbionts, while the tissues of corals which have not been regularly exposed to thermal stress tend to have more symbionts of clade type C.

Ray Berkelmans and Madeleine van Oppen (Australian Institute of Marine Science) have showed that for adult Acropora millepora can acquire increased thermal tolerance if the dominant zooxanthellae symbiont changes from Symbiodinium of clade type "C" to type "D".  

Role of zooxanthellae in coral thermal resilience - a nugget of hope

There's a lot more research and information out there.

Of course, this doesn't mean that algal symbionts of Indo-Pacific corals will change or evolve naturally to more heat tolerant types quickly enough to avert major die-offs if there is another ENSO event like 1998.  Nor do we know whether it would be possible or safe to introduce "Type D" or other heat tolerant algal symbionts to vulnerable corals in order to increase their resilience in the face of thermal stress.  But scientists are looking at these questions, and this research certainly offers a breath of hope, particularly the indication that it may be possible for mature corals to acquire new, more heat-resistant algal symbionts.

I'll be back in Komodo in about a week and will try to hit some of the same places.

"Frogfish" (Robert Delfs)

Thanks, Mike.  I saw a lot of bad bleaching here in Indonesia and in the Philippines in 1998.  In and around Bali, the beautiful acropora corals at Menjangan Island in the shallows were completely taken out.  People who dive there now mostly don't realize that the corals they see in the shallows are all just 10-11 years old, and are growing on the dead remains of the large coral structures that once surrounded most of that island.  The Gilis were hit very hard too.  Komodo, on the other hand, wasn't really affected much by bleaching, presumably because of the cold water upwellings from the south kept ocean temperatures in the park within a reasonable range.  And the powerful currents flowing through the Lembeh Strait and around the northeast tip of Sulawesi apparently protected those reefs from serious damage in 1998 too.  (If memory serves, the Maldives and other locations in the Indian Ocean were the places that were hit hardest that year.)

I'm no meteorologist, but my understanding is that we just had the beginnings of a shift from El Nino (warming) to La Nina (cooling) conditions in the Pacific in May/June, and that La Nina conditions are expected to continue to develop over July-August and may extend out until 2011.  If so, then the worst of this ENSO event may be over and reefs may not be affected as seriously as they were in 1998.  But it's not time to relax.

Although the El Nino/La Nino cycle is a natural phenomenon; ocean temperature fluctuations associated with ENSO events are now combined with global warming effects, which may mean mass die-offs like 1998 will now happen more frequently.  

The oceans are the biggest and most important carbon sink on the entire planet, sequestering about 2 gigatonnes of carbon every year.  About a third of that total is taken up as calcium carbonate and locked into coral reefs that currently cover about 1.55 million sq. km (600,000 sq. mi) of the earth's surface.  (Oceanic carbon sequestration is also carried out by foraminifers, marine shells and other organisms.)  So die-offs on the scale of 1998 could dramatically affect the ocean's ability to continue to absorb carbon dioxide emissions generated by fossil fuels, deforestation, and other factors.

Robert

Well, news to the BBC, maybe.

The freshwater Yangtze finless porpoise has been considered a separate sub-species (Neophocaena phocaenoides ssp. asiaorientalis) endemic to the middle and lower reaches of the Changjiang and genetically distinct from marine relatives since 1992 or 1998 (sources disagree), and a number of experts assume that this and another sub-species (N. p. sunameri)  should be classified as a new species distinct from the global population of N. phocaenoides.

Whether this population is considered a separate species or sub-species taxanomically has important implications for its conservation status. The global N. phocaenoides is ranked "Vulnerable" (A2cde) on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, but the Yangtze finless porpoise, as a sub-species, is ranked separately by the IUCN as "threatened".  Higher threat ranking can help justify and mobilize more governmental, NGO, community and other resources to protect this endangered mammal.

One of the most important current threats to Yangtze finless porpoises is the practice of installing large numbers of fixed nets on the lake bottoms of expansion/flood lakes on both northern and southern banks of the river.  Finless porpoises become entangled in these untended, sturdily-built, nets and drown.  RARE and WWF are working with Chinese wetlands nature reserves and community groups to try to induce local fishermen to reduce or eliminate this practice.

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(The photograph was taken at East Dongting Lake near the channel to the Yangtze in November 2009, during the winter low-water, so the nets are exposed.)

See: Xiujiang Zhao et al "Abundance and conservation status of the Yangtze finless porpoise in the Yangtze River, China," Biological Conservation 141:12, Dec 2008 pp 3006-3018.)  See also http://www.iucnredlist.org.  (The IUCN's Red List is a very important conservation site with extensive, carefully compiled, highly credible and up-to-date information about threatened species.)